Who Is Rep.-Elect George Santos? His Résumé May Be Largely Fiction.

OnWis97 · December 2022

mrussel1 said:

Will the hilarious ironies never cease?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/voter-fraud-crusader-mark-meadows-may-be-charged-with-voter-fraud-after-registering-at-mobile-home/ar-AA15hrJ4

Every
accusation
is
a
confession

Gern Blansten · December 2022

https://twitter.com/MollyJongFast/status/1603423761662967810

muy interesante

mrussel1 · December 2022

Gern Blansten said:

https://twitter.com/MollyJongFast/status/1603423761662967810

muy interesante

yeah this guy is cooked.

I'm also interested if Ron is going to stick up for the college freshman kid that runs ElonJets. He is in Florida. Isn't Ron sick of big tech harming his constituents?

Halifax2TheMax · December 2022

Damn, The Ragin’ Cajun was right. And what a happening tailpipe of a party. Good luck.

They were only trying to help.

A group of House Republican moderates (yes, a few specimens still survive in the wild) met with Kevin McCarthy this week to help him right his listing bid for the speakership. In a show of support, they passed out pro-McCarthy lapel buttons: stars on a field of blue with a red band in the middle that proclaimed, simply, “O.K.”

The letters were meant to signify “Only Kevin,” CNN’s Melanie Zanona reported, as a rejoinder to the Never-McCarthy hard-liners on the right. But the message had an unfortunate double meaning that highlighted the doubts about the always-a-bridesmaid-never-a-bride candidate for speaker. McCarthy is just that: Okay. As in: not great. Not even above average. Just okay. One can anticipate future pro-McCarthy slogans as the Jan. 3 speaker election approaches:

“McCarthy is adequate.”

Follow Dana Milbank's opinions

“Meh.”

“He’s the best we’ve got.”

“[Shrug emoji].”

The “O.K.” buttons may have been the biggest messaging misfire since McCarthy, called a “moron” by Speaker Nancy Pelosi over his resistance to pandemic safety measures, removed all doubt about the charge by selling T-shirts with large letters proudly announcing: “Moron.”

The “O.K.” buttons fared no better than the “Moron” T-shirts. I watched members vote on the House floor soon after the distribution of the buttons. I couldn’t spot a single member wearing one.

**

McCarthy has a knack for garbled messages. If he does succeed in his speakership quest (which is likely, if only for the lack of an alternative), he will earn the distinction of being the first speaker in U.S. history not to speak fluent English.

For eight years, I have been attempting to make sense of his sentences and mostly come up empty. Deep in his brain there seems to be a syntax scrambler (I’m guessing it was put there by Hunter Biden, or perhaps the Chinese) that causes violent clashes between subjects and objects, nouns and verbs, singular and plural, and past and present.

In 2014, I wrote that “his words come out as if they have been translated by Google from a foreign language.” Revisiting his “valiant but often unsuccessful struggles with the English language” a year later, I concluded: “The speaker-apparent apparently still can’t speak.”

Now he’s making another lunge for the top job, and words continue to bedevil him. “We’re Christmas season,” he announced this week. We are? He continued: “A talk of the majority right now who wants to put a small continuing resolution to bump all the members up two days before Christmas, to try to vote on a package they cannot read, written by two individuals who will not be here, on spending for the entire government.”

Do not even attempt to diagram that sentence. Nor these:

“Did they learn nothing in the last month election? Did they learn nothing with the American public being harmed? And to walk through to pass the largest bill that we passed throughout the year in the last days before Christmas, where they won’t even tell you what the baseline is now, the two people who will not be here are held accountable to their constituents, that they’re going to determine this?”

Have I answers no to questions pose you, Speaker Mister.

Out tumbled clauses and phrases cruelly severed from their intended meaning: “Now they want to jam the American public in exactly what they want to do … stop the fentanyl coming for killing our children … we wouldn’t have a border that’s run away … we do much stronger in the majority … What argument did I propose that have anything to do with the speaker? … And if two people who are who deciding it aren’t going to be held up to the voters, do you feel good about that as an American, not about as a reporter?”

**

In fairness, the zaniness in McCarthy’s caucus would be enough to scramble the most orderly mind. Consider just a few examples from recent days.

Russia’s release of basketball star Brittney Griner in a prisoner exchange prompted the usual denunciations by Republicans and (of course!) calls for President Biden’s impeachment. But Rep. Troy Nehls of Texas saw a conspiracy afoot. “I find the timing of this interesting,” he told the right-wing outlet Newsmax. “We pass this Marriage Equality Act and it’s interesting — Brittney Griner comes home that day.” So Vladimir Putin and Biden were secretly in cahoots to promote same-sex marriage by sending Griner home to her wife?

Not to be outdone, Rep. James Comer (Ky.), who will chair the House Oversight Committee, suggested the WNBA star’s release was tied to … Hunter Biden. “We fear that this administration’s compromised because of the millions of dollars that Hunter Biden and Joe Biden have received from Russia and China,” he told Fox News. “You look at just what happened yesterday. This bizarre prisoner swap that clearly was in the benefit of Russia is another example of why we need to investigate to see if, in fact, this administration is compromised.”

But the secret Hunter Biden-Brittney Griner nexus had to compete with many other outrages identified by House Republicans. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, speaking at a New York Republican dinner, announced that “you can pick up a butt plug or a dildo at Target and CVS nowadays.” She further informed the group that if she and Steve Bannon had organized the Jan. 6 insurrection, “we would have won. Not to mention, it would’ve been armed.”

Actually, Jan. 6 insurrectionists were armed. Perhaps the Georgia Republican would have supplied the mob with drugstore sex toys?

We also learned this week that, 11 days after the insurrection, and three days before Biden’s inauguration, Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) was still trying to get President Donald Trump to declare martial law. His only problem was he didn’t know how to spell it. In a text to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows just published by Talking Points Memo, Norman wrote: “Our LAST HOPE is invoking Marshall Law!!”

If this weren’t evidence enough that McCarthy’s incoming majority has gone to the dogs, Politico’s Daniel Lippman reports that incoming Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) hired as his chief of staff one Brandon Phillips, who was arrested last month on a charge of animal cruelty for allegedly kicking a dog and cutting its belly. The would-be staffer had resigned as Trump’s Georgia director in 2016 after his prior criminal history came out.

Congressman, please: Let go Brandon.

**

McCarthy’s lead tormentor is Rep. Andy Biggs (Ariz.), who is mounting a symbolic candidacy for speaker and is part of a bloc of five Never-McCarthy Republicans vowing to deny Mr. O.K. the job. McCarthy doesn’t have five votes to spare, so he is cutting backroom deals with Republican holdouts that would effectively surrender to right-wingers the power to paralyze the chamber for the next two years.

The latest demand from the holdouts? Immediate impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s secretary of homeland security.

This week, I listened for more than 40 minutes as Biggs and his colleagues (16 White men and two White women, by my count) took turns denouncing Mayorkas. Standing behind a campaign-style Impeach Mayorkas yard sign, they were strikingly personal in their attacks: “Regularly lies.” “Malice against the people of the United States.” “Intentional and knowing disregard for human life.” “Disgusting.” “Despicable.” “Purposefully endangering the American people … for crass political purposes.”

But they didn’t have much in the way of high crimes and misdemeanors. Mostly, they objected to the border policies of Mayorkas’s boss. For example, Norman, of “Marshall Law” fame, claimed that Biden had said the border “is not a problem.” (Biden said no such thing.)

Rep. Brian Babin (R-Tex.) complained that “16,000 illegal aliens were apprehended crossing the southern border in the last 48 hours. Also in the last 48 hours, $97 million worth of narcotics were seized.” Umm, doesn’t that mean that border laws are being enforced?

Before the election, McCarthy saidhe didn’t think anybody in the Biden administration deserved impeachment. But the Biggs band has forced a U-turn. Two weeks after the election, McCarthy threatened Mayorkas with impeachment. Biggs boasted to me and other reporters that it happened only “after he knew that he was facing somebody who was gonna possibly deny him the speakership.”

**

McCarthy’s flip-flop on the Mayorkas impeachment is just one of many concessions hard-liners are extorting. Some are parliamentary. Others are oddly specific, such as cuts to food stamps. (Take food from hungry people or kiss your speakership goodbye!) Members of the far-right Freedom Caucus have demanded McCarthy include right-wing poison pills in future debt ceiling increases and must-pass bills — an almost certain prescription for defaults and shutdowns.

Fearing just such an outcome from the House radicals, Senate Republicans have reached out to House Democrats to negotiate an omnibus spending bill for 2023 (an “omni-bill” in McCarthy-speak) before the GOP takeover of the House on Jan. 3. Why? They don’t think McCarthy will be up to the task.

Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) told Politico “it’s too much to ask” of McCarthy to fund the government. Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) told Semafor that “for Kevin’s sake … some Republicans just feel like we should relieve him of that burden.”

McCarthy initially agreed with his would-be Senate saviors, and encouraged negotiators to reach a deal. But (recurring theme alert) he reversed himself under pressure from hard-liners and now says the matter should wait until Republicans take control.

A band of Senate conservatives this week tried to rally support behind McCarthy’s latest position, urging GOP colleagues to postpone the negotiations.

Sen. Mike Lee of Utah said he disagreed with the several Republicans who told him “it’ll be too hard for Kevin McCarthy.”

Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) urged a postponement to give “House Republican leadership opportunity to … come up with a plan.”

But the Senate band was small: only four lawmakers. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), billed as a participant, was a no-show. A reporter asked if the sparse attendance meant that Senate Republicans are “tacitly admitting that House Republicans just aren’t ready.”

“Umm,” replied Lee, “those who are making that point are not doing so tacitly. They’re doing so explicitly.”

And they’re doing so because they know that an O.K. speaker of the House is not good enough.

mickeyrat · December 2022

https://apnews.com/article/nebraska-omaha-pete-ricketts-ben-sasse-ec19501e5c57a677505118c6dae9e820

Weekend Reads Nebraska Omaha Pete Ricketts Ben Sasse

Sasse's exit from Senate prompts GOP unease over replacement

By MARGERY A. BECK

16 Dec 2022

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — When Republican Jim Pillen becomes Nebraska’s governor next month, one of his first acts will likely be to name his predecessor and biggest supporter to fill an open U.S. Senate seat.

Pillen was elected in November in large part because of current Gov. Pete Ricketts ’ backing, and now he can return the favor by appointing him to the Senate, more than 15 years after Ricketts spent $12 million of his own money on a failed bid for the office.

Even as they acknowledge Ricketts is deeply conservative and qualified to replace outgoing Sen. Ben Sasse, some Republicans aren’t sure such an appointment would be a good idea.

“It looks bad. It smells bad. What it looks like is two rich guys using their money and power to grab a Senate seat,” said Jeremy Aspen, an Omaha Republican and former state party delegate. “This is how authoritarian countries operate, where a powerful few ride roughshod to get what they want. Things like this stay on voters’ minds.”

It's hard to overstate how much Ricketts helped Pillen, a veterinarian and hog farmer, win his party's nomination after a contentious primary race featuring several candidates, including one endorsed by former President Donald Trump.

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Ricketts donated more than $100,000 of his own money directly to Pillen’s campaign. Ricketts also gave nearly $1.3 million this year to the political action committee Conservative Nebraska, which ran a slew of attack ads against Pillen's primary opponents, including the Trump-backed candidate, Charles Herbster.

Whoever is appointed to replace Sasse will serve two years before a special election is held in 2024 to finish out the last two years of the term. The person would have to seek re-election in 2026 for another six-year term.

“For the sake of Pillen's nascent administration, Ricketts’ reputation and the wellbeing of the state, they need to consider not doing this,” Aspen said. “Pillen could appoint someone not so tied to him. There are plenty of conservative Republicans in the state that could fill that seat for two years. Then Ricketts could run for it in 2024. Let the voters decide.”

Sasse, who has a new job as president of the University of Florida, is leaving the Senate just two years into his second term. He has had a complicated relationship with Republicans in Nebraska after his outspoken criticism of Trump. He was one of seven Republican senators to vote to convict the former president of “incitement of insurrection” after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack.

Ricketts didn't respond to requests to comment on the criticisms surrounding his likely appointment. Pillen issued a statement saying only that he'll be conducting a thorough process to select the best candidate. He's given a deadline of Dec. 23 for those interested in the seat to apply. Ricketts announced his application last week.

“I’ll be looking to appoint someone who embodies the commonsense, conservative values of Nebraska,” Pillen said.

If appointed, Ricketts would step in as one of the wealthiest senators in the chamber with a reputation for using that wealth to back conservative causes and candidates. Ricketts’ put his net worth at about $50 million when he ran for a second term as governor in 2018.

Ricketts has freely used his money to both push his political agenda and to get allies elected to key political seats. In 2016, he spent $300,000 on a successful ballot measure that reinstated the death penalty after lawmakers voted to override his veto and abolish capital punishment. He also donated extensively to conservative legislative candidates, including some who challenged more moderate Republicans who defied Ricketts’ push to keep the state’s death penalty.

In addition to his own wealth, even wealthier family members have often contributed to his and other conservative causes. While Ricketts donated $100,000 to the ballot effort to require Nebraska voters to show a photo ID to vote, Ricketts' mother dropped $1.5 million into the ballot initiative, which voters passed in November. Ricketts’ father, TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts, is worth an estimated $4 billion. This year, according to Open Secrets, the senior Ricketts gave nearly $5.5 million — all to Republican candidates and causes — putting him in the Top 50 political donors for the year.

All that money — especially that spent by the Ricketts family to elect Pillen as Nebraska's newest governor — has the appearance of buying a Senate seat, said Ryan Horn, a Republican political consultant from Omaha. Ricketts' ambition to serve in the U.S. Senate is no secret. In 2006, he challenged then-U.S. Sen. Ben Nelson, a Democrat, but lost badly.

Ricketts would probably be a good senator for Nebraska, Horn said. He would likely vote the way most Republicans in Nebraska would want. But it shouldn't be up to the new governor who owes his political success to Ricketts to fast-track Ricketts to Congress, he said.

“This has the feeling of the fix being in so that they don’t have to really face the voters. It seems that they’re avoiding, as much as possible, a fair fight," Horn said. "The way this is being done is cynical, and cynicism is a mortal threat to democracy.”

Other Republicans don't share that sentiment. Several even advocated the idea of Ricketts appointing himself to the Senate seat if Sasse had stepped down before Ricketts finished out his term early next month.

One of those is Mark Fahleson, a former chairman of the Nebraska Republican Party, who stands by his comments that Ricketts should have appointed himself if he'd had the opportunity because “he’s the obvious candidate for the job.”

“Pete could spend his money on expensive cars and extravagant excursions. Instead, he uses his personal money to promote public policies he believes will help Nebraska and our country,” Fahleson said. “You can disagree with those policies, but I don't believe it's debatable that it's a more thoughtful and benevolent use of his personal resources.”

Pillen's office has not revealed who has applied for the soon-to-be vacated Senate seat, but at least one Democrat has submitted an application: Ann Ashford, the Omaha widow of former Congressman Brad Ashford. Ann Ashford ran unsuccessfully for Nebraska's Omaha-based 2nd Congressional District House seat in 2020.

mickeyrat · December 2022

gift article....

Who Is Rep.-Elect George Santos? His Résumé May Be Largely Fiction. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/19/nyregion/george-santos-ny-republicans.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuonUktbfqYhlSlUaCibTTMIqoRyBg7_AzbsmiXK7NyGTVTFZiuIERpKN41rHYatobt0omTSHQdsLeJkeeMtP9M4NdUp8V1vv5ZKehJUOJyhyot29AGhugZ-IAbtm-Hq3ZDWwbe4ile364UPZYGm6DfPb0ScrNx8l9cU-DSyi0HEPwavGFeBniJIpjbp6WMcMFXpXbzKKvvLoFx1-JN2NCxnZ4QU1UOlSMirByZ_es_lTNVUPVi-VCS938m0-69lDOdsIPa2ZLxAofML2gbV5GXWL1FBZpy2XVYIm5t2uXuaf

Who Is Rep.-Elect George Santos? His Résumé May Be Largely Fiction.

Mr. Santos, a Republican from New York, says he’s the “embodiment of the American dream.” But he seems to have misrepresented a number of his career highlights.

By Grace Ashford and Michael Gold

Dec. 19, 2022Updated 8:51 a.m. ET

George Santos, whose election to Congress on Long Island last month helped Republicans clinch a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, built his candidacy on the notion that he was the “full embodiment of the American dream” and was running to safeguard it for others.

His campaign biography amplified his storybook journey: He is the son of Brazilian immigrants, and the first openly gay Republican to win a House seat as a non-incumbent. By his account, he catapulted himself from a New York City public college to become a “seasoned Wall Street financier and investor” with a family-owned real estate portfolio of 13 properties and an animal rescue charity that saved more than 2,500 dogs and cats.

But a New York Times review of public documents and court filings from the United States and Brazil, as well as various attempts to verify claims that Mr. Santos, 34, made on the campaign trail, calls into question key parts of the résumé that he sold to voters.

Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, the marquee Wall Street firms on Mr. Santos’s campaign biography, told The Times they had no record of his ever working there. Officials at Baruch College, which Mr. Santos has said he graduated from in 2010, could find no record of anyone matching his name and date of birth graduating that year.

continues....

Halifax2TheMax · December 2022

mickeyrat said:

gift article....

Who Is Rep.-Elect George Santos? His Résumé May Be Largely Fiction. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/19/nyregion/george-santos-ny-republicans.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuonUktbfqYhlSlUaCibTTMIqoRyBg7_AzbsmiXK7NyGTVTFZiuIERpKN41rHYatobt0omTSHQdsLeJkeeMtP9M4NdUp8V1vv5ZKehJUOJyhyot29AGhugZ-IAbtm-Hq3ZDWwbe4ile364UPZYGm6DfPb0ScrNx8l9cU-DSyi0HEPwavGFeBniJIpjbp6WMcMFXpXbzKKvvLoFx1-JN2NCxnZ4QU1UOlSMirByZ_es_lTNVUPVi-VCS938m0-69lDOdsIPa2ZLxAofML2gbV5GXWL1FBZpy2XVYIm5t2uXuaf

Who Is Rep.-Elect George Santos? His Résumé May Be Largely Fiction.
Mr. Santos, a Republican from New York, says he’s the “embodiment of the American dream.” But he seems to have misrepresented a number of his career highlights.
By Grace Ashford and Michael Gold
Dec. 19, 2022Updated 8:51 a.m. ET
George Santos, whose election to Congress on Long Island last month helped Republicans clinch a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, built his candidacy on the notion that he was the “full embodiment of the American dream” and was running to safeguard it for others.
His campaign biography amplified his storybook journey: He is the son of Brazilian immigrants, and the first openly gay Republican to win a House seat as a non-incumbent. By his account, he catapulted himself from a New York City public college to become a “seasoned Wall Street financier and investor” with a family-owned real estate portfolio of 13 properties and an animal rescue charity that saved more than 2,500 dogs and cats.
But a New York Times review of public documents and court filings from the United States and Brazil, as well as various attempts to verify claims that Mr. Santos, 34, made on the campaign trail, calls into question key parts of the résumé that he sold to voters.
Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, the marquee Wall Street firms on Mr. Santos’s campaign biography, told The Times they had no record of his ever working there. Officials at Baruch College, which Mr. Santos has said he graduated from in 2010, could find no record of anyone matching his name and date of birth graduating that year.
continues....

Doh! Can’t spell rubes without repubs.

The Juggler · December 2022

Why didn't the NY Times or the democrats bother to do any opposition work on this fraud before the election? They totally just took NY for granted and, ironically, it cost them the house. Crazy.

Gern Blansten · December 2022

The Juggler said:

Why didn't the NY Times or the democrats bother to do any opposition work on this fraud before the election? They totally just took NY for granted and, ironically, it cost them the house. Crazy.

They didn't lose the house by this one race though...

The Juggler · December 2022

Gern Blansten said:

The Juggler said:

Why didn't the NY Times or the democrats bother to do any opposition work on this fraud before the election? They totally just took NY for granted and, ironically, it cost them the house. Crazy.

They didn't lose the house by this one race though...

I know. But they lost a few more there that they likely assumed they'd win just because it's NY

Plus people always die and retire so if the margin was tad closer, that could be huge.

tempo_n_groove · December 2022

This is an interesting story. Chang won the assembly seat from a Democrat. The dems aren't denying that. They say he doesn't live in Brooklyn so they are voting to not seat him because of that rule.

Cray.

https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/politics/2022/11/30/brooklyn-republican-lester-chang-assembly-vote-unseat-special-election

gimmesometruth27 · December 2022

we are truly in the stupidest of political timelines.

xavier mcdaniel · December 2022

Halifax2TheMax said:

mickeyrat said:

gift article....

Who Is Rep.-Elect George Santos? His Résumé May Be Largely Fiction. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/19/nyregion/george-santos-ny-republicans.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuonUktbfqYhlSlUaCibTTMIqoRyBg7_AzbsmiXK7NyGTVTFZiuIERpKN41rHYatobt0omTSHQdsLeJkeeMtP9M4NdUp8V1vv5ZKehJUOJyhyot29AGhugZ-IAbtm-Hq3ZDWwbe4ile364UPZYGm6DfPb0ScrNx8l9cU-DSyi0HEPwavGFeBniJIpjbp6WMcMFXpXbzKKvvLoFx1-JN2NCxnZ4QU1UOlSMirByZ_es_lTNVUPVi-VCS938m0-69lDOdsIPa2ZLxAofML2gbV5GXWL1FBZpy2XVYIm5t2uXuaf

Who Is Rep.-Elect George Santos? His Résumé May Be Largely Fiction.
Mr. Santos, a Republican from New York, says he’s the “embodiment of the American dream.” But he seems to have misrepresented a number of his career highlights.
By Grace Ashford and Michael Gold
Dec. 19, 2022Updated 8:51 a.m. ET
George Santos, whose election to Congress on Long Island last month helped Republicans clinch a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, built his candidacy on the notion that he was the “full embodiment of the American dream” and was running to safeguard it for others.
His campaign biography amplified his storybook journey: He is the son of Brazilian immigrants, and the first openly gay Republican to win a House seat as a non-incumbent. By his account, he catapulted himself from a New York City public college to become a “seasoned Wall Street financier and investor” with a family-owned real estate portfolio of 13 properties and an animal rescue charity that saved more than 2,500 dogs and cats.
But a New York Times review of public documents and court filings from the United States and Brazil, as well as various attempts to verify claims that Mr. Santos, 34, made on the campaign trail, calls into question key parts of the résumé that he sold to voters.
Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, the marquee Wall Street firms on Mr. Santos’s campaign biography, told The Times they had no record of his ever working there. Officials at Baruch College, which Mr. Santos has said he graduated from in 2010, could find no record of anyone matching his name and date of birth graduating that year.
continues....

Doh! Can’t spell rubes without repubs.

This is my congressional district. I never considered voting for this guy. Biggest mistake in this district was Tom Suozzi running for governor when he had little chance of winning the primary. It's pretty wild to me it's my district since my part of Queens is a part of the city few people are actually familiar with.

Halifax2TheMax · December 2022

xavier mcdaniel said:

Halifax2TheMax said:

mickeyrat said:

gift article....

Who Is Rep.-Elect George Santos? His Résumé May Be Largely Fiction. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/19/nyregion/george-santos-ny-republicans.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuonUktbfqYhlSlUaCibTTMIqoRyBg7_AzbsmiXK7NyGTVTFZiuIERpKN41rHYatobt0omTSHQdsLeJkeeMtP9M4NdUp8V1vv5ZKehJUOJyhyot29AGhugZ-IAbtm-Hq3ZDWwbe4ile364UPZYGm6DfPb0ScrNx8l9cU-DSyi0HEPwavGFeBniJIpjbp6WMcMFXpXbzKKvvLoFx1-JN2NCxnZ4QU1UOlSMirByZ_es_lTNVUPVi-VCS938m0-69lDOdsIPa2ZLxAofML2gbV5GXWL1FBZpy2XVYIm5t2uXuaf

Who Is Rep.-Elect George Santos? His Résumé May Be Largely Fiction.
Mr. Santos, a Republican from New York, says he’s the “embodiment of the American dream.” But he seems to have misrepresented a number of his career highlights.
By Grace Ashford and Michael Gold
Dec. 19, 2022Updated 8:51 a.m. ET
George Santos, whose election to Congress on Long Island last month helped Republicans clinch a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, built his candidacy on the notion that he was the “full embodiment of the American dream” and was running to safeguard it for others.
His campaign biography amplified his storybook journey: He is the son of Brazilian immigrants, and the first openly gay Republican to win a House seat as a non-incumbent. By his account, he catapulted himself from a New York City public college to become a “seasoned Wall Street financier and investor” with a family-owned real estate portfolio of 13 properties and an animal rescue charity that saved more than 2,500 dogs and cats.
But a New York Times review of public documents and court filings from the United States and Brazil, as well as various attempts to verify claims that Mr. Santos, 34, made on the campaign trail, calls into question key parts of the résumé that he sold to voters.
Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, the marquee Wall Street firms on Mr. Santos’s campaign biography, told The Times they had no record of his ever working there. Officials at Baruch College, which Mr. Santos has said he graduated from in 2010, could find no record of anyone matching his name and date of birth graduating that year.
continues....

Doh! Can’t spell rubes without repubs.

This is my congressional district. I never considered voting for this guy. Biggest mistake in this district was Tom Suozzi running for governor when he had little chance of winning the primary. It's pretty wild to me it's my district since my part of Queens is a part of the city few people are actually familiar with.

Looking at the candidates and the vote totals, makes me wonder why Suozzi ran for governor. Seemed he would have been a lock had he run for his congressional seat again. Did he give a reason for running for governor? Maggie Three Names wandering the halls of congress looking for the unisex bathrooms make him uneasy?

xavier mcdaniel · December 2022

Halifax2TheMax said:

xavier mcdaniel said:

Halifax2TheMax said:

mickeyrat said:

gift article....

Who Is Rep.-Elect George Santos? His Résumé May Be Largely Fiction. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/19/nyregion/george-santos-ny-republicans.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuonUktbfqYhlSlUaCibTTMIqoRyBg7_AzbsmiXK7NyGTVTFZiuIERpKN41rHYatobt0omTSHQdsLeJkeeMtP9M4NdUp8V1vv5ZKehJUOJyhyot29AGhugZ-IAbtm-Hq3ZDWwbe4ile364UPZYGm6DfPb0ScrNx8l9cU-DSyi0HEPwavGFeBniJIpjbp6WMcMFXpXbzKKvvLoFx1-JN2NCxnZ4QU1UOlSMirByZ_es_lTNVUPVi-VCS938m0-69lDOdsIPa2ZLxAofML2gbV5GXWL1FBZpy2XVYIm5t2uXuaf

Who Is Rep.-Elect George Santos? His Résumé May Be Largely Fiction.
Mr. Santos, a Republican from New York, says he’s the “embodiment of the American dream.” But he seems to have misrepresented a number of his career highlights.
By Grace Ashford and Michael Gold
Dec. 19, 2022Updated 8:51 a.m. ET
George Santos, whose election to Congress on Long Island last month helped Republicans clinch a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, built his candidacy on the notion that he was the “full embodiment of the American dream” and was running to safeguard it for others.
His campaign biography amplified his storybook journey: He is the son of Brazilian immigrants, and the first openly gay Republican to win a House seat as a non-incumbent. By his account, he catapulted himself from a New York City public college to become a “seasoned Wall Street financier and investor” with a family-owned real estate portfolio of 13 properties and an animal rescue charity that saved more than 2,500 dogs and cats.
But a New York Times review of public documents and court filings from the United States and Brazil, as well as various attempts to verify claims that Mr. Santos, 34, made on the campaign trail, calls into question key parts of the résumé that he sold to voters.
Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, the marquee Wall Street firms on Mr. Santos’s campaign biography, told The Times they had no record of his ever working there. Officials at Baruch College, which Mr. Santos has said he graduated from in 2010, could find no record of anyone matching his name and date of birth graduating that year.
continues....

Doh! Can’t spell rubes without repubs.

This is my congressional district. I never considered voting for this guy. Biggest mistake in this district was Tom Suozzi running for governor when he had little chance of winning the primary. It's pretty wild to me it's my district since my part of Queens is a part of the city few people are actually familiar with.

Looking at the candidates and the vote totals, makes me wonder why Suozzi ran for governor. Seemed he would have been a lock had he run for his congressional seat again. Did he give a reason for running for governor? Maggie Three Names wandering the halls of congress looking for the unisex bathrooms make him uneasy?

I'm not sure why he ran. I personally liked him from meeting him a few times and voted for him in the primary but never felt like he was going to win. In 2020, he was actually losing the early returns before getting a majority of the mailed ballots. Another problem was the redistricting incorporated parts of Queens that contain that element of the GOP, thus giving Santos more inroads. I don't follow politics on a daily basis but it's hard not to notice when it's the congressional district I voted in.

mickeyrat · December 2022

https://youtu.be/2NvQvjZS30o

Halifax2TheMax · December 2022

Totally sounds like Antiiiiiiiiifa and BLM’ers have teamed up. Totally.

‘They are preparing for war’: An expert on civil wars discusses where political extremists are taking this country

Barbara F. Walter, 57, is a political science professor at the University of California at San Diego and the author of “How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them,” which was released in January. She lives in San Diego with her husband.

Having studied civil wars all over the world, and the conditions that give rise to them, you argue in your book, somewhat chillingly, that the United States is coming dangerously close to those conditions. Can you explain that?

So we actually know a lot about civil wars — how they start, how long they last, why they’re so hard to resolve, how you end them. And we know a lot because since 1946, there have been over 200 major armed conflicts. And for the last 30 years, people have been collecting a lot of data, analyzing the data, looking at patterns. I’ve been one of those people.

We went from thinking, even as late as the 1980s, that every one of these was unique. And the way people studied it is they would be a Somalia expert, a Yugoslavia expert, a Tajikistan expert. And everybody thought their case was unique and that you could draw no parallels. Then methods and computers got better, and people like me came and could collect data and analyze it. And what we saw is that there are lots of patterns at the macro level.

In 1994, the U.S. government put together this Political Instability Task Force. They were interested in trying to predict what countries around the world were going to become unstable, potentially fall apart, experience political violence and civil war.

Was that out of the State Department?

That was done through the CIA. And the task force was a mix of academics, experts on conflict, and data analysts. And basically what they wanted was: In all of your research, tell us what you think seems to be important. What should we be considering when we’re thinking about the lead-up to civil wars?

Originally the model included over 30 different factors, like poverty, income inequality, how diverse religiously or ethnically a country was. But only two factors came out again and again as highly predictive. And it wasn’t what people were expecting, even on the task force. We were surprised. The first was this variable called anocracy. There’s this nonprofit based in Virginia called the Center for Systemic Peace. And every year it measures all sorts of things related to the quality of the governments around the world. How autocratic or how democratic a country is. And it has this scale that goes from negative 10 to positive 10. Negative 10 is the most authoritarian, so think about North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain. Positive 10 are the most democratic. This, of course, is where you want to be. This would be Denmark, Switzerland, Canada. The U.S. was a positive 10 for many, many years. It’s no longer a positive 10. And then it has this middle zone between positive 5 and negative 5, which was you had features of both. If you’re a positive 5, you have more democratic features, but definitely have a few authoritarian elements. And, of course, if you’re negative 5, you have more authoritarian features and a few democratic elements. The U.S. was briefly downgraded to a 5 and is now an 8.

And what scholars found was that this anocracy variable was really predictive of a risk for civil war. That full democracies almost never have civil wars. Full autocracies rarely have civil wars. All of the instability and violence is happening in this middle zone. And there’s all sorts of theories why this middle zone is unstable, but one of the big ones is that these governments tend to be weaker. They’re transitioning to either actually becoming more democratic, and so some of the authoritarian features are loosening up. The military is giving up control. And so it’s easier to organize a challenge. Or, these are democracies that are backsliding, and there’s a sense that these governments are not that legitimate, people are unhappy with these governments. There’s infighting. There’s jockeying for power. And so they’re weak in their own ways. Anyway, that turned out to be highly predictive.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/03/08/they-are-preparing-war-an-expert-civil-wars-discusses-where-political-extremists-are-taking-this-country/

Halifax2TheMax · December 2022

And then the second factor was whether populations in these partial democracies began to organize politically, not around ideology — so, not based on whether you’re a communist or not a communist, or you’re a liberal or a conservative — but where the parties themselves were based almost exclusively around identity: ethnic, religious or racial identity. The quintessential example of this is what happened in the former Yugoslavia.

So for you, personally, what was the moment the ideas began to connect, and you thought: Wait a minute, I see these patterns in my country right now?

My dad is from Germany. He was born in 1932 and lived through the war there, and he emigrated here in 1958. He had been a Republican his whole life, you know; we had the Reagan calendar in the kitchen every year.

And starting in early 2016, I would go home to visit, and my dad — he doesn’t agitate easily, but he was so agitated. All he wanted to do was talk about Trump and what he was seeing happening. He was reallynervous. It was almost visceral — like, he was reliving the past. Every time I’d go home, he was just, like, “Please tell me Trump’s not going to win.” And I would tell him, “Dad, Trump is not going to win.” And he’s just, like, “I don’t believe you; I saw this once before. And I’m seeing it again, and the Republicans, they’re just falling in lockstep behind him.” He was sonervous.

I remember saying: “Dad, what’s really different about America today from Germany in the 1930s is that our democracy is really strong. Our institutions are strong. So, even if you had a Trump come into power, the institutions would hold strong.” Of course, then Trump won. We would have these conversations where my dad would draw all these parallels. The brownshirts and the attacks on the media and the attacks on education and on books. And he’s just, like, I’m seeing it. I’m seeing it all again here. And that’s really what shook me out of my complacency, that here was this man who is very well educated and astute, and he was shaking with fear. And I was like, Am I being naive to think that we’re different?

That’s when I started to follow the data. And then, watching what happened to the Republican Party really was the bigger surprise — that, wow, they’re doubling down on this almost white supremacist strategy. That’s a losing strategy in a democracy. So why would they do that? Okay, it’s worked for them since the ’60s and ’70s, but you can’t turn back demographics. And then I was like, Oh my gosh. The only way this is a winning strategy is if you begin to weaken the institutions; this is the pattern we see in other countries. And, as an American citizen I’m like, These two factors are emerging here, and people don’t know.

So I gave a talk at UCSD about this — and it was a complete bomb. Not only did it fall flat, but people were hostile. You know, How dare you say this? This is not going to happen. This is fearmongering. I remember leaving just really despondent, thinking: Wow, I was so naive to think that, if it’s true, and if it’s based on hard evidence, people will be receptive to it. You know, how do you get the message across if people don’t want to hear it? If they’re not ready for it.

I didn’t do a great job framing it initially, that when people think about civil war, they think about the first civil war. And in their mind, that’s what a second one would look like. And, of course, that’s not the case at all. So part of it was just helping people conceptualize what a 21st-century civil war against a really powerful government might look like.

After January 6th of last year, people were asking me, “Aren’t you horrified?” “Isn’t this terrible?” “What do you think?” And, first of all, I wasn’t surprised, right? People who study this, we’ve been seeing these groups have been around now for over 10 years. They’ve been growing. I know that they’re training. They’ve been in the shadows, but we know about them. I wasn’t surprised.

The biggest emotion was just relief, actually. It was just, Oh my gosh, this is a gift. Because it’s bringing it out into the public eye in the most obvious way. And the result has to be that we can’t deny or ignore that we have a problem. Because it’s right there before us. And what has been surprising, actually, is how hard the Republican Party has worked to continue to deny it and to create this smokescreen — and in many respects, how effective that’s been, at least among their supporters. Wow: Even the most public act of insurrection, probably a treasonous act that 10, 20 years ago would have just cut to the heart of every American, there are still real attempts to deny it. But it was a gift because it brought this cancer that those of us who have been studying it, have been watching it growing, it brought it out into the open.

Does it make you at all nervous when you think about the percentage of people who were at, say, January 6th who have some military or law enforcement connection?

Yes. The CIA also has a manual on insurgency. You can Google it and find it online. Most of it is not redacted. And it’s absolutely fascinating to read. It’s not a big manual. And it was written, I’m sure, to help the U.S. government identify very, very early stages of insurgency. So if something’s happening in the Philippines, or something’s happening in Indonesia. You know, what are signs that we should be looking out for?

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Halifax2TheMax · December 2022

And the manual talks about three stages. And the first stage is pre-insurgency. And that’s when you start to have groups beginning to mobilize around a particular grievance. And it’s oftentimes just a handful of individuals who are just deeply unhappy about something. And they begin to articulate those grievances. And they begin to try to grow their membership.

The second stage is called the incipient conflict stage. And that’s when these groups begin to build a military arm. Usually a militia. And they’d start to obtain weapons, and they’d start to get training. And they’ll start to recruit from the ex-military or military and from law enforcement. Or they’ll actually — if there’s a volunteer army, they’ll have members of theirs join the military in order to get not just the training, but also to gather intelligence.

And, again, when the CIA put together this manual, it’s about what they have observed in their experience in the field in other countries. And as you’re reading this, it’s just shocking the parallels. And the second stage, you start to have a few isolated attacks. And in the manual, it says, really the danger in this stage is that governments and citizens aren’t aware that this is happening. And so when an attack occurs, it’s usually just dismissed as an isolated incident, and people are not connecting the dots yet. And because they’re not connecting the dots, the movement is allowed to grow until you have open insurgency, when you start to have a series of consistent attacks, and it becomes impossible to ignore.

And so, again, this is part of the process you see across the board, where the organizers of insurgencies understand that they need to gain experienced soldiers relatively quickly. And one way to do that is to recruit. Here in the United States, because we had a series of long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria, and now that we’ve withdrawn from them, we’ve had more than 20 years of returning soldiers with experience. And so this creates a ready-made subset of the population that you can recruit from.

What do you say to people who charge that this is all overblown, that civil war could never happen here in the United States — or that you’re being inflammatory and making things worse by putting corrosive ideas out there?

Oh, there’s so many things to say. One thing is that groups — we’ll call them violence entrepreneurs, the violent extremists who want to tear everything down and want to institute their own radical vision of society — they benefit from the element of surprise, right? They want people to be confused when violence starts happening. They want people to not understand what’s going on, to think that nobody’s in charge. Because then they can send their goons into the streets and convince people that they’re the ones in charge. Which is why when I would talk to people who lived through the start of the violence in Sarajevo or Baghdad or Kyiv, they all say that they were surprised. And they were surprised in part because they didn’t know what the warning signs were.

But also because people had a vested interest in distracting them or denying it so that when an attack happened, or when you had paramilitary troops sleeping in the hills outside of Sarajevo, they would make up stories. You know, “We’re just doing training missions.” Or “We’re just here to protect you. There’s nothing going on here. Don’t worry about this.”

I wish it were the case that by not talking about it we could prevent anything from happening. But the reality is, if we don’t talk about it, [violent extremists] are going to continue to organize, and they’re going to continue to train. There are definitely lots of groups on the far right who want war. They are preparing for war. And not talking about it does not make us safer.

What we’re heading toward is an insurgency, which is a form of a civil war. That is the 21st-century version of a civil war, especially in countries with powerful governments and powerful militaries, which is what the United States is. And it makes sense. An insurgency tends to be much more decentralized, often fought by multiple groups. Sometimes they’re actually competing with each other. Sometimes they coordinate their behavior. They use unconventional tactics. They target infrastructure. They target civilians. They use domestic terror and guerrilla warfare. Hit-and-run raids and bombs. We’ve already seen this in other countries with powerful militaries, right? The IRA took on the British government. Hamas has taken on the Israeli government. These are two of the most powerful militaries in the world. And they fought for decades. And in the case of Hamas I think we could see a third intifada. And they pursue a similar strategy.

Here it’s called leaderless resistance. And that method of how to defeat a powerful government like the United States is outlined in what people are calling the bible of the far right: “The Turner Diaries,” which is this fictitious account of a civil war against the U.S. government. It lays out how you do this. And one of the things it says is, Do not engage the U.S. military. You know, avoid it at all costs. Go directly to targets around the country that are difficult to defend and disperse yourselves so it’s hard for the government to identify you and infiltrate you and eliminate you entirely.

So, like with the [Charles Dickens’s] ghost of Christmas future, are these the things that will be or just that may be?

I can’t say when it’s going to happen. I think it’s really important for people to understand that countries that have these two factors, who get put on this watch list, have a little bit less than a 4 percent annual risk of civil war. That seems really small, but it’s not. It means that, every year that those two factors continue, the risk increases.

The analogy is smoking. If I started smoking today, my risk of dying of lung cancer or some smoking-related disease is very small. If I continue to smoke for the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years, my risk eventually of dying of something related to smoking is going to be very high if I don’t change my behavior. And so I think that’s one of the actually optimistic things: We know the warning signs. And we know that if we strengthen our democracy, and if the Republican Party decides it’s no longer going to be an ethnic faction that’s trying to exclude everybody else, then our risk of civil war will disappear. We know that. And we have time to do it. But you have to know those warning signs in order to feel an impetus to change them.

The Juggler · December 2022

Now we got Boebert and Marge going at it.

Gonna be an entertaining two years watching these turds eat each other alive.

GOP

Comments

Who Is Rep.-Elect George Santos? His Résumé May Be Largely Fiction.

Who Is Rep.-Elect George Santos? His Résumé May Be Largely Fiction.

Who Is Rep.-Elect George Santos? His Résumé May Be Largely Fiction.

Who Is Rep.-Elect George Santos? His Résumé May Be Largely Fiction.

Who Is Rep.-Elect George Santos? His Résumé May Be Largely Fiction.

Totally sounds like Antiiiiiiiiifa and BLM’ers have teamed up. Totally.

‘They are preparing for war’: An expert on civil wars discusses where political extremists are taking this country

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